


texas bluebonnets

by naheka



Category: Fear the Walking Dead (TV)
Genre: Backstory, Calicia if you squint, F/M, Gen, Spoilers for S2, Spoilers for S4, Suicide Attempt, but really gen and like kidsquad platonic family feels
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-05-01
Updated: 2018-05-01
Packaged: 2019-04-30 14:12:29
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,296
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/14498757
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/naheka/pseuds/naheka
Summary: When Alicia Clark was ten, she decided she was too old for baths.(Alicia through the years)





	texas bluebonnets

**Author's Note:**

> trigger warning for attempted suicide

When Alicia was very very young, those hazy years where she’s not quite sure how old she was or maybe even if it really happened–maybe it’s just the story Madison tells after two glasses of wine on her father’s birthday–but when she was very very young she used to wake up early and stand up in her crib, quiet but expectant, thumb in her mouth. 

Her father would come and swoop her up and let her sit on the counter while he made them pancakes. She can vaguely recall the taste of them, sticky batter with a hint of vanilla and sometimes, on special occasions, fruit and chocolate chips, the juice staining her fingers, melted cocoa smears around her mouth.

++

When Alicia was ten, she declared herself too old for baths. 

She has vague memories of before then. She tries to hold on to the ones of her father the longest: his smile, the way he read to her before bed and let her sneak out to the living room to sleep on the couch while he watched old sitcom reruns. She still has a sense memory to the Fraiser theme song, his aftershave and the rumble of his laugh, how it felt to be scooped up gentle and carried to her princess bed, lilac sheets and stuffed bear under her chin. The suck of her tongue against her thumb.

But she remembers Nick being in charge of her baths, his grumbling fading to little grins when she screws up her face against the soap and how he shielded her eyes with one careful hand while pouring water from the cheap plastic cup over her hair.

‘Quit squirming,’ he’d say, sitting crosslegged behind her on her bed and working a comb through her wavy wet curls. 

‘Like this,’ he’d say, tongue between his teeth and printed out instructions crumpled on the sheets next to them. Taught her how to braid, over and under, his hands over hers.

(And later. His smile gone empty and his words unstable, floating out of his mouth in bubble streams that pop before her ears can hear them. The way he smelled like vinegar and flop dens and how his eyes struggled to stay open as he nodded. Her fingers through his hair while he drifted back and forth. Over and under, untangling his hair and smoothing the grease away. Silk braids in her hands.)

++

Alicia remembers, clearly, the day Nick left for school and she had to stay at the childcare center. She sat on the floor of her room and screamed and refused to eat and when the aid picked her up she went limp, that deadweight slump kids understand instinctively.

Madison has to leave work early to get her and she’s furious with Alicia all the way home. When Nick gets home she’s not allowed to play with him and is sent to bed without dinner. Madison tells her she’s not allowed dessert for a week and that Nick is doing big kid things, like learning how to read, and can’t have distractions.

Nick sneaks in after Madison’s gone to bed and wakes Alicia up to gives her two handfuls of honey nut cheerios. They eat them together under the bed, lying on their bellies and whisper giggling. There’s crumbs in her sheets for a week.

Alicia goes to daycare and sighs really long in the car and monotones her apology to the workers and accepts no swings for the next two days as consequences for her actions. During freeplay she goes to the shelf with the bright colored covers and looks for a book with words. She sits against the wall and glares at the book and just knows if she can learn how to read she can go to big kid school with Nicky.

(Her report card is still exemplary. Madison praises her absently. Nick finds a half melted birthday candle in the junk drawer and sticks it into a twinkie. Sings her a made up good grades song and kisses just behind her ear.)

++

In the summer they vacation with the cousins on her father’s side. It’s her mother’s concession to keeping in touch–sometimes they get Christmas gifts from her paternal grandparents but it’s always something a little off: clothes that are too small or CDs they’re not interested in. Alicia doesn’t mind her cousins–she’s the youngest and they mostly leave her alone, but Nick adores them. Older by several years and running wild throughout their suburb and the surrounding hills. 

Alicia doesn’t like the way they smell like smoke but she’s bored and Nick ignores her when they’re with older kids and a few of her girl cousins take her shopping and buy her headbands and tell her she’s gorgeous. They pierce her ears and hold her hand when she cries and give her blouses and body glitter, and--later in the woods under the moon--wine coolers and peppermint schnapps.

She throws up the next morning and they laugh but it’s good natured, accepting. She tries a puff of their cigarette and pulls a face and likes the way she looks in the mirror, eyeshadow and curled lashes and metal glinting in her ears. She waits two weeks for Madison to comment but she never does.

(Nick blinks at her, hungover on the trainride home. Taps her nose and says she better not get any more piercings until she turns 21. Slips her mint gum to get the sour peppermint and ash taste off her tongue.)

++

Alicia gets straight As. She used to show her mother her report cards but stopped for some reason, she can’t remember. She leaves them on the kitchen counter with the rest of the mail and Nick finds them, pins them to the refrigerator with bright magnets and tries to get her something sweet for after dinner, her favorite candy or an ice cream bar.

In the summer Alicia signs herself up for summer courses and Madison greets the idea enthusiastically, praising her while she writes the check. Alicia doesn’t smile back. She thinks her mother is more excited about having Alicia out of the house and out of the way more than her mother is excited about her academic prowess. Nick is off to summer camp with his friends and Madison is going on a cruise with her new boyfriend.

Her cousin comes over to check on her every so often, the one that pierced her ears, and they watch romcoms and do each other’s nails and sleep in the living room. When Alicia comes home with straight As her cousin cheers and cracks a bottle of vodka to celebrate. Alicia throws up in the bushes outside her bedroom window and burns her fingertips lighting a cigarette.

(Nick snatches the pack from her room and cracks a joke about making her eat the entire pack. Then he prints out images of diseased lungs and tapes them to the bathroom mirror even though he always smells like cheap smoke and cheaper perfume when he comes home late. “You’re not like me,” he tells her when she confronts him. His eyes are unfocused and there’s bandaids in the crooks of his elbows. “You’re better than me.”)

++

Alicia doesn’t bother bringing home the mandatory forms for Madison to sign. She’s been forging Madison’s signature since grade school, and the sex drug safety unit is no different. She scrawls her mother’s name and turns it in to her bio teacher and settles in for the easiest unit of the year. Every year they watch the same video about uteruses and periods and body hair and every year their teacher tells them to ask their parents any additional questions. When Alicia turned thirteen tampons appeared in the bathroom she and Nick share as if by magic and her mother pinned a calendar on the wall of her bedroom, without a word.

This year they do drugs and alcohol in more detail. The cart with the television and the VCR unit is rolled in, the teacher muttering about the squeaky wheel, and watch a video with a man in a cheap suit who tells them that drinking alcohol kills. Alicia frowns. She remembers summer nights, balmy dipping to chilly around a fire with marshmallows and jello shots and her cousins’ easy acceptance, the way they listened to her and let her play games with them and drink vodka in the woods under the stars. Lies, she thinks, just how she started to think when Madison says she loves her. All lies.

(Lies. _It’ll be different this time_ and _I promise_ and _I’m sorry, I love you_.)

++

Her sophomore year she’s awarded a certificate for academic excellence. The other children’s parents come and she scans the crowd for Nick but he’s not there. She shakes the principal’s hand and he tells her she’s doing so well, what a shame about that brother of hers. Her mother must be so proud.

She goes home and no one is there. She throws the certificate away and searches Nick’s room until she finds a joint. She smokes it on the roof and ignores her phone buzzing next to her; her mother says she’s driving Nick to another facility. Her mother says it will work this time. Her mother says she wants to stay close to Nick during this time of recovery. her mother says not to expect her back for three days.

(Nick’s letter comes on the fourth day, when Madison still isn’t back. She reads it on the roof, exhaling big clouds and flicking the roach away when it’s burned out. All his sorries; his amends. His promises for the future. She puts it in the shoebox under her bed with all the others.)

++

Alicia stops going to school her junior year. She wakes up one morning to her alarm and thinks: why? Her work is done and her bag is packed neatly by the door and she has the double block of English today, her favourite class, but instead she just rolls over and falls back asleep.

She watches twelve seasons of Grey’s Anatomy in a week and plays tetris until her wrist hurts. Every night the registrar calls and leaves a message on the answering machine and Alicia listens to it absently while she picks at her dinner and Madison taps away at her phone. On the fifteenth day she unplugs the housephone because she’s tired of hearing it; no one else notices.

(Nick is gone again. Comes through once in a while to crash in his room and take a shower and raid the fridge. Takes her ipod with him one time; she locks her laptop in her desk to keep it safe.)

++

There’s a boy who picks on Chris in the hallways of their school. He’s not really a jock because they don’t live in a soap opera. He’s a ‘C’ student with a job in the library and two twin sisters who play volleyball. Brown hair and second string on varsity tennis and a mean streak you can sense from a mile away rippling under his dimple. A smile like a snake in the grass.

Alicia leans against her locker and watches them. The girl at her shoulder mutters, pity for the poor boy who gets knocked into the water fountain, his backpack tossed up onto the roof.

(Alicia doesn’t pity. She watches Chris’s jaw clench when the boy whispers in his ear and the clench of his fists at his side and the way he twitches like he wants to rip the bully open with his teeth and his nails and eat him raw, the jackal lying inside Chris’s skin and kept on a chain.)

++

Nick comes home with clear eyes and looks at her over the breakfast her mother made them all get up early to eat: french toast, pancakes, bacon, eggs three different ways, sausage links and hot rolls. He’s almost squinting at her and she’s unsettled, shaken. She doesn’t miss a class for the full week he’s home, and it’s good. She does her homework in the living room and he sits next to her and eats cereal with his mouth open while he watches television. He says he’s gonna register for community college. He jokes he’ll need her to tutor him and laughs when she hits him with the throw pillow.

There’s someone there to roll their eyes with her at Madison during meals and he lays across her bed late at night and they talk about the novels she’s reading in AP English. He gestures with his hands when he talks, long fingers and slender wristed, his voice rasping thoughtful and almost sleepy. Alicia has always thought he was the smartest person she’d ever met.

She comes home and his smile is loose and his hands restless, crawling across the tablecloth. His eyes are crinkled up at the corners and he blinks too slow and she watches Madison ignore all of it and burns a little, in her chest beside her heart.

(Once when Alicia was ten she decided she was too old for bathtubs. Madison clucked and scolded but Nick printed out pictures of Berkeley dorm rooms at the library, ten cents a printout, and pins them to the corkboard in her room. No bathtubs at Berkeley. Her cousin mailed her a pennant and Nick hefted her up on his shoulder and she tacked it to her wall and Madison scowled because they ruined the paint. She looked at it every day while she dressed for school and every day she could hear her mother crying over her father, and then over Nick, and the days Madison didn’t get out of bed, and the days she could hear Nick throwing up in the bathroom across the hallway and the days she woke up all alone.)

++

Nick’s favourite meal is macaroni and cheese. Basic, she teased him when he was in high school. Madison goes all out on it, french recipes and online tinkering and fluctuating amounts of butter and milk.

Does Madison really know anything at all, Alicia wonders absently on a day they’re home alone, tossing kraft singles atop a strainer full of macaroni elbows fresh from the pot, steaming heavily. She stirs it sticky thick and plops it in a bowl and when she hands it to him on the sofa he beams at her. 

“Just how I like it,” he sighs. 

He tucks her into his side and flips through the channels and when he’s done his thumb brushes up under her shirt on her bare hip, his fingernail tickling.

++

Alicia finds a bottle of pills under his mattress and locks the door of her bedroom. She lines them up in rows, four by four and then six by six. She touches the bump of them, licks the bitter white residue from her fingerpad and pulls a face. She puts them all back in the bottle and takes the drawer out of her desk to tape them underneath.

(Nick used to cry at night. Not sobs or wails but choked cut off shuddering wracking tears. In the bathroom with the water running but she could still hear him. In the kitchen in the middle of the night looking at the knives with awful blank eyes.)

++

Alicia turns sixteen and no one notices. it’s so ridiculous and cliche that she hates it more than if someone had remembered. She skips class and sleeps in until early afternoon.

She tries to make pancakes. The box is where it used to be, but shoved all the way back on the highest shelf. It’s dusty on top and she wets a paper towel to clean it up before shaking it into a bowl. “Click,” she says when she breaks the eggs, because it’s what her father used to tell them say. Firs her, and then Nick. Two eggs in a bowl. “Click,” she says again, because he’s not there.

The powder is too crumbly and the eggs don’t mix and she let the pan get too hot. A splatter burns her wrist and she throws it all away. Nothing is ever the same, she thinks. Nothing is ever as good.

++

Nick calls her at midnight two days later. “Leeshy,” he hums, when he hears the line click open. “Licia leeshy leesha.”

“It’s late. i have school tomorrow.”

“You’re too old now to have time for your big brother?” his voice is glassy and there’s sounds in the background, a woman’s giggle. “I remembered,” he adds, so proud of himself.

“It’s Thursday,’ she tells him, but he’s not listening.

“Am i the first? I set an alarm to be the first, I’m always first. I tried, Licia.”

Alicia hates him. She hates her father and she hates Nick and she hates herself. “Yeah,” she says, soft gentle. She’s smiling, a little. “You’re the first.”

++

Chris buys her a notebook. It’s exactly the kind she likes, down to the thickness and the gloss and she doesn’t think anyone else in the world has ever noticed a thing about her. She bursts into tears and he almost falls over himself giving her the gift receipt. She kisses his cheek instead and he flushes bright and bashful. He doesn’t stop smiling the entire day. The pen bites into the paper like a blade and her cursive rolls across the page, a thousand tiny cuts.

( _Do you remember? Do you remember when we sat on the front steps and you showed me how to peel a grapefruit and we ate it bitter and raw under the sun? I think that might have been what happy is._ )

++

Alicia goes to school and is pulled aside by a counselor. He calls her Alison by mistake and lays out her records and notes from her teachers. He says they’re scheduling a meeting with her mother and she laughs before she can swallow it back down. He offers to arrange weekly visits to his office during homeroom and says he’s sure they can come with a plan for her to graduate on time. Alicia stares at the floor and shrugs until he lets her leave.

She goes home and looks through her old papers, meticulously kept in binders and in shoeboxes under the bed. She used to want to be a doctor. She used to want to be a teacher. She used to get straight As and Nick used to play cards with her on the living room floor and always let her win.

(All his letters smoothed out and laid into a row. All the times he promised this time would be the last time. All the times he said he’d make it up to her.)

++

When Alicia was ten she decided she was too old for baths. 

She was right, she thinks, as she settles in. She’s too tall now, her knees too gangly. The porcelain is cold and uncomfortable under her head. She’s wearing shorts and she watches the goosebumps prickle on her legs, the prickle of stubble where she missed a spot shaving. She lines the pills up on her knees and they’re chalky going down. Bitter on the back of her tongue but she figures that won’t last long.

(The sun on the back of her neck, uncomfortably warm. The flutter of the breeze through her sweatdamp hair. Peeling away the white part of the grapefruit and the tiny pink cells in her fingers. Bitter on her tongue and between her teeth when she smiles. Nick’s shoulder against hers and their feet dangling in the pool.)

++

Nick is holding her in a bridal carry and that’s not right. She remembers being carried from the car and the couch and he always held her gently against his front like a child. She tries to tell him it’s not right and when he tells her to shut up he sounds like he’s crying, not like he’s angry. He forces a finger down her throat and she’s too weak to shove him away. Her throat burns and she thinks there’s vomit on her shirt and he holds her under the spray even when she cries and begs him and says it’s too cold.

++

Madison comes once and cries a lot and says she’s sorry and that it’s so hard and Alicia is still a little out of it and the crook of her elbow burns where they put the IV in and she pretends to be asleep until Madison leaves.

All her meals come without utensils and there’s no mirror in the bathroom. A nurse stands outside and watches her when she has to pee. a girl on her floor pries the staples out of her chart and swallows them so a nurse comes and take the magazines away.

Nick doesn’t visit. Sometimes she wakes up and her hand is by her side, the palm upturned and the fingers faintly curled. The air smells like him and the chair is in a different position than it was when she fell asleep.

++

Chris comes and won’t look at her. His eyes look red rimmed and hesitant and he reads her little bits from books he brings from her bookshelves. He touches her wrist gently before he leaves and tells her to get better soon. He says he’ll try to visit again but he’s being sent back to his mom for a while.

++

Alicia’s nurse is businesslike and she looks apologetic when she says that no one has come to visit her on her eighteenth birthday. She shakes out a pair of sweats and says they had them lying around but Alicia sees the tags from the shop in the lobby. When she dresses there’s twenty bucks stuffed into the right pocket, two fives and a ten. She signs her own release forms and doesn’t take the pamphlets the receptionist offers with lists of resources.

++

Alicia takes a taxi home and no one is there. She makes herself a sandwich and giggles at the knife block, imagining the nurse’s face to see her now. Fluffernutter and jelly and pretzel sticks and diet soda.

The door slams open and she jumps. Nick is crazy eyed, hair windswept, panting like he’s run a long way. He sees her and crosses the room in a blink. He grabs her by the shoulders, his mouth opened to yell. His throat bobs.

And, ridiculously, she starts to cry. 

++

Nick is mad at her. His jaw is tight and he sleeps on the floor of her room and when she gets up to use the bathroom he sits up and stares until she comes back. When she showers he sits on the toilet with his arms crossed. She wakes up once at three in the morning and he’s kneeling at her side by the bed, hunched over, his shoulders shaking.

“I’m sorry,” she finally tells him, sitting at the breakfast table and picking at rye toast. “I’m sorry.”

He doesn’t say anything for a long time. Then he slides the poached egg from his plate to hers. He disappears around lunch for the first time and Alicia is at a loss, alone-time an unfamiliar feeling. He comes back with a stack of textbooks and paper packets.

“I signed you up for summer school.” He tosses another packet. “And to dual enroll in community college.”

Alicia frowns. She opens her mouth and stops. “Okay,” she says. She takes a four hour nap and leaves the books in a pile on her desk. She rips up the summer school papers and throws them into the recycling bin.

++

Chris pokes his head into her room and says he’s drawn her a bath. He smells faintly of lavender. “I’m too old for baths,” she tells him, and he shrugs. 

He leaves the door open behind him and she knows she’s imagining the smell of oils and soft drift of steam but they prickle at her until she goes into the bathroom and slips under the water. Just on the side of too hot and sweat prickles on her hairline. She follows it up with a cold shower and drifts out of the bathroom to Chris’s room. She’s drowsy and he’s at his desk, book in his lap, staring at her. She curls up on under his blanket and after a moment she feels him gently lift her head and slide his pillow underneath.

++

Alicia takes the GED and scores nearly perfect. Chris lies and says he wants to take it too and helped her study, quizzing her out of the back of the prep book he bought second hand. She enrolls in community college and meets with a counselor and doesn’t feel one way or the other about it so she goes to her first class.

She’d forgotten how much she likes school.

++

“This is my fault,” Nick tells her. “You think I don’t know that?”  
Alicia is stirring red sauce at the stovetop. She’s trying to remember if there’s canned mushrooms in the pantry.

“Not everything,” she says, “is about you.”

++

Chris comes with her to the bookstore and helps her find her textbooks and finds a keychain in the bargain bin in the student union shop. He clips his car keys to it, his mother’s old car, and they drive long and windy to lay on the beach in the sun. She burns and he doesn’t and they walk in the surf up to their calves until the sun goes down and Nick starts calling.

(Chris cuts his sandwiches into fourths. He eats green beans out of the can like potato chips. He hums in Spanish when he thinks he’s alone in the kitchen and his accent is clumsy.)

++

Alicia wakes with a start and Nick is sitting on the edge of her bed. His head is in his hands, a slip of folded paper between his fingers, worn and creased. “I don’t know,” he says, and his voice cracks in the middle. “I don’t know,” he admits. She waits for a long time. 

She touches his thigh. “It’s okay,” she says, and he crumples into her slow and then all at once; they clutch at each other like children. 

“I remember,” he says quiet, when it’s gone dark dark outside and everything is soft and muted. It’s raining, distantly, water pinging on the roof. “I remember eating grapefruit on the front steps.”

“Me too,” Alicia says. She waits for him to say something else but she falls asleep first. She thinks that’s okay, though. She can ask him about it later.

++

Nick picks her up from community college and there’s a niggle of a thought, fleeting, that they could wait for Chris. but Nick swoops her up (he smells like sweat and white vinegar) and spins her and says ‘taco truck’ in that deep voice with the wiggling eyebrows that makes her giggle and she just forgets.

They sit on the bumper at the airport and sour cream smears on her chin. She licks refried beans from Nick’s wrist and laughs when he kisses her cheek, hotsauce lips. They lie on their backs on the hood of the car and have to grab at each other by the waist to avoid sliding off, the airplanes roaring overhead, the world vibrating around them.

(This is them, Alicia thinks. He’s high and her GPA is perfect and Madison loves him more than her but neither of them enough. He’s not ever gonna get clean and someday she’s gonna have to bury him. That’s just how it is.)

++

Chris limps in with his hand tucked in his jacket and Alicia follows him, silent and curious, to the bathroom. he cleans himself up and winces and she leans against the doorframe. “That looks broken.”

“Dislocated,” he says. His thumb pops when he forces it back into the socket and he sighs, some of the tension bleeding out of his shoulders. 

“Does it hurt?”

“Kinda.” He turns towards her. “Dinner?”

Alicia waves in the general direction of the kitchen. “Casserole in the oven.” 

He nudges by her, oddly gentle, and she follows after him. 

“Did it hurt at first?”

“No.” He yanks open a drawer and frowns when she taps him on the shoulder with the oven gloves. He thumps the casserole on the top of the stove with a clang and digs in with a fork.

“Why not?”

“Why do you care?”

Alicia shrugs. “I don’t, i guess.” She hesitates on her way out. Fishes in the fridge and sidles up to him like one of Nick’s dealers, peace offering in hand. “Hotsauce?”

She’s in her room with headphones in and math book out when Chris appears to hover awkwardly in the hall just outside her open door. She pulls an earbud out and raises an eyebrow.

“It didn’t hurt,’ he tells her, tapatio pink on his teeth like blood. “I was too angry.”

++

The world cracks open from the inside, crumbling. It’s been two weeks since she had a shower and she thinks Nick might be dead. Chris wakes her up early, a finger across her lips. “Ssshh,’ he whispers. He leads her away by the hand, crouching under a tree with bed hair and morning breath and the gauntness in their cheeks and chests.

The orange peels in their fingers, the grime under their nails. It bursts on her tongue like a sunbeam. “Happy birthday, Licia,” he whispers. He’s never called her that before. 

She slips her fingers in his mouth and he suckles softly at the juice on her skin, under the dirt.

(She thinks about that, after. After Chris leaves and doesn’t come back, after she looks down a sewer grate and sees Nick there and he somehow looks better than he did when she cried over Matt while he tossed Matt’s bathroom for drugs. Thinks about oranges and grapefruits and Christopher dead by the side of the road.)

++

Nick finds her sitting up on a ridge, huddled against a tree trunk. “Dad liked pancakes,” she says before he can talk. “I think. Did he?”

Nick’s shoes shuffle in the gravel. They found them two weeks earlier on a corpse, extra shirts tied around their faces and gagging while they went through its pockets and took its shoes. “I can’t remember,” he admits. “I think–I think you did. so he did too.”

Alicia wipes at her face, oddly wet. “Was he a good dad?”

“Chris was a good brother.” Nick’s hand touches her shoulder, tentative. “Better than me.”

“I didn’t have him,’ Alicia says, hollow. “You're clean and I don't even have you.” She doesn’t say anything else and after a while Nick leaves. 

Chris cut his sandwiches in fourths, Alicia thinks. He ate green beans out the can like potato chips. He remembered her birthday and held her hand when she was all alone.

++

Alicia’s twenty five years old and she can’t quite remember what her father looked like. The world is gone and so is Chris. Somewhere out there there’s a field of flowers with Nick’s blood dried on the petals. Her knife made a sick wet noise when she pressed it into the soft spot on his temple and then again at the base of his skull. 

She’s been tracking them for a week, split away from the others. She doesn’t sleep well unless her rifle’s in her hands, her finger on the safety. She dreams of killing them all.

She finds a box of bisquick in a house with blood on the walls and eats the powder in fistfulls, choking on the dryness of it. There’s three tattoos on her wrist and she thinks at least she won’t ever need to add any others. 

She doesn’t think she ever really liked pancakes.

**Author's Note:**

> no beta, please excuse errors


End file.
